1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a user profile opening apparatus and method, and more particularly, to a user profile opening apparatus and method for opening one user's profile in response to a view request from some other user terminal on a community site.
2. Description of the Related Art
The Japanese Patent Application Publication Laid-Open Kokai No. 058484/2003 describes community sites for users of similar tastes and the like to communicate with each other via a network such as the Internet.
Moreover, The Japanese Patent Application Publication Laid-Open Kokai No. 1186821/2002 discloses a communication system for presenting one's picture to introduce themselves with their appearance and impression to others.
It is not preferable, however, for security reasons to open one's profile including their picture, name, address, age or phone number on the network. Therefore, taking only the security facet into consideration, it is preferable for one to minimize the profile information to be opened to others.
On the other hand, if you communicate with other users on a community site, it would be more favorable to open your profile as much as possible and provide more, information to others. This is because that would make it possible to increase the number of people that you can get to know or to give a sense of security to someone whom you have come to know. Moreover, by opening your profile as much as possible, you could become closer to your mail friend.
However, in conventional communication systems described in such as the above Japanese Laid-Open Kokai publications, if you want to make your profile open to only someone with whom you have become acquainted and you are sure about safety, while ensuring security, you have to set different ranges of profile information to be opened for other users on a per-user basis. Particularly, if you communicate with a great number of users, to set different per-user ranges of profile information to be opened to the users would be quite a troublesome operation that is required of the user and this is not practical.
In the foregoing conventional communication systems, there has been a problem that it is difficult to open one's profile for other users on a community site while ensuring security.